Information provided in the following paragraphs is for background understanding only, and should not be taken as a disclaimer as prior art to the present invention unless specifically denoted as such. Information contained in this section of this patent application may be considered part of other inventions of the current assignee, inventors, or both assignee and inventors. As such, only diagrams and text which are indicated as prior art should be understood to be a disclaimer from the invention.
“Partition mobility” is a term which refers to the ability of a computing system to relocate the data content of logical partitions within a plurality of computer readable memory devices while one or more programs or processes may be using the data in those pages. In some scenarios, the logical partitions are relocated from one physical memory device (e.g. RAM devices, hard drives, cache devices, etc.) to another physical memory device within the same server computer system. In other scenarios, however, the migration involves moving the logical partition from the hardware of a first computer server system to second computer server system, such as when it's associated owner process is moved from one server to another server.
Live Partition Mobility (LPM)™ is a component option of the International Business Machines' (IBM) AIX™ operating system which, within a matter of a few seconds, can migrate entire system environment for a process being executed, including the state of the microprocessor the contents of memory any attached virtual devices and all connected users quickly and accurately.
In particular, live partition mobility is another step towards IBM's total virtualization continuum. This feature can be combined with other features of IBM's virtualization technologies including light workload partitions, the San volume controller, and others in order to provide full virtualization of computing platforms with a dynamic degree of flexibility to meet today's on demand computing requirements.
LPM can be used to migrate entire partitions and hosted applications from one hardware computing server to another computing server with minimal or no disruption to the services and loads they are handling. This allows even the most stringent of service level agreements to be met. In other applications or usages of LPM, load balancing can be achieved across multiple computing systems by performing necessary migrations of instances of application programs and their associated logical partitions. And administrators may use LPM to assist in periodic maintenance of existing computer systems as well as bringing online expansion of computing infrastructure capabilities.
And, conversely, system administrators may use LPM to consolidate applications and their data pages onto fewer application servers in order to free up hardware for other uses. Such consolidation efforts may also be used to minimize power consumption during low load conditions.
Partitions may exist in one of two states—powered off (inactive), or providing service (active). As one might expect, inactive partitions may be migrated with relatively less complexity than migration of active partitions. However, partitions which are active such as partitions being used by a running database program can also be migrated in a live production environment during normal user activities with no loss of data or loss of connectivity to the database or its data, and no effect on any executing transactions as they occur. And, migrations can occur between any supporting platform such as many of the IBM AIX computing systems.